How to easily make your own tire sidewall textures

[XCNuse]

from experience i believe we all here know its bothersome to make sidewall textures, and always something you can do to make it look even better

well, last night i was talking to equinox and he said he was making a sidewall texture, and i asked him if he knew any tricks to doing it; no success, he does it the same way i do (and only way i know until last night) and thats by warping it manually

so here we go, how to make an easy sidewall texture

1: open a photo editing program, i have PSP8 so thats what i will use.
there is a simple and general way of doing this (this is what i will be doing) or, you can get the distance between the the 2 radii on your tube if you want to be more precise, however i like to keep things general and easily fixable (dont want to misjudge something like the 2 radii and have to redo the texture because of stretching)

so.. i have started up PSP8 and will make a normal rectangular texture
right now, im working with a 512x128 texture and will make a bon jovi sidewall texture (lol, quoting from his song have a nice day)


i have saved that as a jpg, and will now start up 3dsmax

i created a plane, 512x128 just to fit the texture well, with 100 length sections (or you could use meshsmoother), and applied the texture to it with a color value of 100


now to do a little math, we have to make the radius of the circle equal to that of the circumference which will be 512 (same as length of plane we made)
and so back to geometry we go, using the formula:
C = Pi * D
now to some simple algebra, C=512 Pi=3.141592
so, D=C/pi
therefore, we should land up with the diameter being roughly 162.974695
D/2 = radius so thats about 81.487347

so we go to create, and make a spline circle wherever, and set its radius value to 81.487 (since 3dsmax only takes it to the thousandths, we went to millionths just to keep it correct)


now, select the plane with your texture on it, and go to the modifiers list and go to path deform


select pick path, and click on the circle we just made.
since i am using the top view, i wil change the path deform axis to X, and it will automatically make me a perfect donut shape that i can now render


and the final product


although it may look funny, this is only because i did it so thick, normally as we all know, sidewalls on wheels are getting smaller and smaller .. well, every year

anyways, thanks for your interest and hopefully this will help making those pesky sidewall bump maps TONS easier

and once your done, just save (or screenshot) the render, and cut out the unecesary black background and save it as a file type and... boom you have a sidewall texture that will last you forever
rock on :buttrock:

[Ravens]

Nice and handy!!

Have a nice day mate

[XCNuse]

oh hey, one last thing equinox just brought to my attention, sidewall textures are not very tall, mine is.. thats why mine looks funny, but if/when someone figures out what a 'normal' distance and height is for the rectangular texture would be, please post , thanks

[EquiNOX]

I am glad you found that idea and it's quick and easy way doing it. Thanks!

[teeworks.]

hehe, cool idea!! thanks for the hint!

[maul]

Thanks for explaining this I played around with it today and I got really good results, you have to have a pretty long plane too get it right, mine was 7200x220 and here is my result One tip for all, here can you find logos for like every tire make

[EquiNOX]

Thank you Maul for the tips

[Chris_TC]

The sidewall texture you've created is upside down - it nees to be bent the other way or mirrored before you bend it.

BTW, I describe another way of creating realistic sidewalls using Photoshop on my site.
http://www.digipiction.de/tutorials.html#
Click on -> Creating a Car Tire Sidewall

[maul]

lol saw that now it was just a test so i don't care that much about it, Nice tutorial BTW:buttrock:

[EquiNOX]

Hey Chris TC... You were one that does beautiful BMW modeling Absoutelly almost perfect steering wheel right? I saw it somewhere when I googled it and some how I lost the link.

[Chris_TC]

Hey Chris TC... You were one that does beautiful BMW modeling Absoutelly almost perfect steering wheel right? I saw it somewhere when I googled it and some how I lost the link.

Yes, I've been working on that car last year. I never finished it but I'm about to come back to it because I need it for a short movie I'm working on.
Maybe I'll post a thread here once I get back to it.

[slice56]

thats a great tutorial chris. thanks alot!